Being Latin rite Catholic, we do things out of sync with lots of the commercial, sporting and political world. You see today is the "end of the year" for us and next Sunday we will start a new year with preparation for the Christmas season.
However, today's celebration is as political as it is religious. It's a day we celebrate Christ the King. Now I know the republicans within will throw their liturgical arms up in dismay and the cries of "Patriarchy" will echo in the halls of the righteous.
Here's an insightful perspective on this very Catholic day from an unexpected source:
Melissa Florer-Bixler is the pastor of Raleigh Mennonite Church in North Carolina where she works towards the formation of broad coalitions that exercise citizen power for the common good.
This Sunday, the last one in November, the church makes room for Christ the King Sunday. This is the church’s New Year’s Eve, before we remember—once again—that God enters history as an impoverished baby, born to an unwed mother. But before baby Jesus we pause here, remembering the God who formed stars and planets.
The roots of Christ the King feast day go back to 1925 when it was initiated by Pope Pius XI. It was a year of grief, the nations reeling from World War I as government structures and institutions devastated by war left a vacuum filled by terror. That year, Benito Mussolini made a speech to the Italian Chamber of Deputies that was the turning point for his reign of fascism. The Ku Klux Klan held a march in Washington, D.C. that attracted 35,000 white supremacists. In 1925, Hitler was rebuilding the Nazi party and solidified his role as absolute leader. The future was uncertain.
Pope Pius wanted to remind the church of God’s absolute rule over history. In his encyclical Quas Primas, he writes to the people that the kingdom to which Christians belong is “spiritual and concerned with spiritual things … it demands of its subjects a spirit of detachment from riches and earthly things, and a spirit of gentleness. They must hunger and thirst after justice and more than this, they must deny themselves and carry the cross.”
I wonder how these words sit with us now, our eyes on history. We now know that Mussolini went on to be one of the world’s worst mass murderers, responsible for 400,000 deaths in World War II, 30,000 more during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The lynching of black people abetted by white Christians in concert with the KKK between 1882 and 1968 is a wound on the soul of our nation. Six million Jews, seven million Soviet citizens, and nearly a million other disenfranchised people died at the hands of the Nazi regime.
What do we say of Pius’ assertion that Christians are to be “concerned with spiritual things” in the face of such terror?
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